Sensory Neuroscience: Hearing and speech

Though Neuroscience is listed as a prerequisite, it will not prepare you adequately for this text until it is finished (and perhaps not even then).

This covers some introductory aspects of the mechanisms of human hearing, sound localization, speech perception and speech production. The reader should have a partial undergraduate education (2nd or 3rd year) in either neuroscience (or psychology, provided the focus is on human biological psychology). This book explains only jargon which is unlikely to have been encountered previously - a working vocabulary of neuroscience terms is expected and required for understanding.

It explores many of the processes which occur between the occurrence of a sound in the world and the perception of that sound. In particular, there is a focus on speech as a distinct type of sound which occurs often in the environment of humans.

The processes involved operate on several levels:

Mechanical (transmission of sound from its source to the outer and middle ears)

Biophysical (transduction in the cochlea)

Neurophysiological (representation of the sound in the nervous system and sound localization)

Perceptive (detecting the sound and discrimination)

Cognitive (identifying the sound)

The text is laid out such that an interested reader can follow it from start to end to learn the subject matter covered - it is not a reference text.